Henry Bartle Frere

Henry Bartle Frere (29 March 1815-29 May 1884) was a British colonial administrator who served as Commissioner of Sindh from 1851 to 1859, Governor of Bombay from 1862 to 1867, and High Commissioner for South Africa from 1877 to 1880.

Biography
Henry Bartle Frere was born in Clydach, Monmouthshire, Wales on 29 March 1815, and he was educated at the East India Company College. He was appointed a writer in the Bombay civil service in 1834, becoming assistant collector at Poona in 1835. In 1848, following the death of the Raja of Satara, he adminsitered the princely state until its annexation into British India a year later. In 1850, he became Commissioner of Sindh, creating a postal system and securing Multan and the Punjab during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. In 1862, he was appointed Governor of Bombay, establishing Deccan College and a civil engineering school. In 1872, Frere was sent to Zanzibar to negotiate an end to the slave trade there, and, in 1875, Queen Victoria made him a baron and a knight. In 1877, Frere was appointed High Commissioner for South Africa, where he sought to create a Canadian-style confederation. He oversaw the 1877 annexation of the Transvaal and the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, which he provoked by issuing an impossible ultimatum to the Zulu king Cetshwayo demanding that he disband his army. The initial British defeat at the hands of the Zulus in the 1879 Battle of Isandlwana and the outbreak of the First Boer War in 1880 led to Frere falling from grace, and he was recalled as High Commissioner in 1880 and censured by Whitehall for acting recklessly. He died in 1884.